Using BlackBerry Work Drives

I have to admit: some weeks ago I never have heard about BlackBerry Work Drives 😉

I also wasn’t aware that there are Applications available from BlackBerry World running only in the work perimeter – so you need BlackBerry Balance and BES 10 to use them.

As a developer you should know about BlackBerry Work Drives – it’s really cool: imagine shared network drives from your Enterprise Server being available on your BlackBerry 10 Devices like normal shared files. That’s what BlackBerry Work Drives will give you. For FREE 🙂

Searching in the BlackBerry World for ‘BlackBerry Work Drives’ you’ll find this application:

BlackBerry World Apps on the Device

Open BlackBerry World – Work:

There are three Tabs to manage the applications in your work perimeter: Search for internal Apps, Public Apps and take a look at ‘My World’ to get an overview. From Public you’ll find the BlackBerry Work Drives to download. This looks similar to the BlackBerry World in your private perimeter.

Download the app !

Map Shared Drives from Enterprise to BlackBerry 10

Now you can Open BlackBerry Work Drives and map your shared network drive to a local one. Use a name you like and enter the credentials and pathes from your server:

Now you can use your work drives same way as local drives. BlackBerry 10 does all to synchronize the data.

You can think about this as your own Secure DropBox 😉

Here you can see how all is integrated:

Top Left: File Manager from Work Perimeter gives access to Device (Work) and BlackBerry Work Drives

Bottom Left: BlackBerry Work Drives are managing the Mapping between Enterprise Server and local Device.

BlackBerry Work Drives from a Developers POV

Files from BlackBerry Work Drives behave like Dropbox or Box and you cann access them as /shared.

So in our sample /shared/ekkesServerDrive would be the correct path to read from or to write to shared network drives on your enterprise server.

Isn’t that easy ?

But attention: if you’re working with full path names – there will be append ‘-enterprise’ to the account path. If you’re not aware of this perhaps an app can be broken using BlackBerry Work Drives . You can read about here in this article.

One response to Using BlackBerry Work Drives

New informations in this article for me. Thank you so much! I haven’t known that BlackBerry Work Drives can act like our very own secure Dropbox, Box, synced offline folder, cloud storage or whatever you would like to call it 🙂 Very productive and useful.